1. Field of the Invention
An embodiment of the invention relates generally to the field of information processing and to information modeling systems, and more particularly, relates to modeling a domain, interacting with the domain and manipulating the domain.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modern ontological systems are handicapped by inconsistent approaches to storing, searching, transmitting, and publishing data and/or services. These inconsistencies prevent modelers (e.g., the people or computer system responsible for creating the ontology) from effectively influencing the system without significant effort. For example, an ontology change may need to be reflected in a model, such as an XML Schema, as well as in any transmitted instances of the ontology such as in XML Documents. In addition, changes may also need to be reflected in the database storing the instances of models (in the case of a relational database management system (RDBMS), for example, tables may need to be modified, created, or deleted). Furthermore, object classes created for use in an object-orientated system may also need to be modified and recompiled.
Tools can significantly reduce the burden on the modeler by allowing for automatic generation of alternative forms of the models after changing an XML Schema or document type definition (DTD). However these tools in themselves are not sufficient for a robust ontology-based system that requires that such models (or instances of the models) be published, maintained, discovered, searched, transmitted or can trigger events.